Notes from the 2015 Worlds of Football academic conference

A combination of flawed recollections and shoddy note taking, interpolations of my own thoughts merging with the words actually said, resulting in the inevitable: a busted chronicle from an unreliable narrator.
First, I would like to apologise for putting this up so long after the conference actually happened, and for any lapses in memory resulting from both the time that has passed and the indecipherable  nature of my note taking. Corrections and additions are most welcome - I've probably especially mucked up my review of Desiree Barron's presentation, which was outstanding.

This is the third of these Victoria University conferences that I've attended, and the fifth or so academic conference I've gone to overall. In some ways then, while not being an out and out veteran of these events, I've been to enough of them to get to know different people, and also move up the scale of seniority even if I haven't presented at most of them, as I didn't here. While I was writing these reviews as a relative novice, the complex networking relationships that needed to be negotiated didn't really occur to me - but as an unofficial quasi-historian (and in this case, de facto official chronicler) of these things now, one has to by necessity tread a little more carefully, avoiding the bluntness that may have characterised some of the previous reviews of these conferences.

(for reference, you can view my reports of the 2010 Worlds of Football conference here, and the 2012 one here.

The overall theme of a conference is usually there only as a guide, and conference programs are notoriously difficult things to set up. While often times you can put together sessions where the different presenters will share much in common, often times the outliers will end up in a hodge podge session, interesting for their diversity and idiosyncrasies, but harder to build a cogent narrative out of. This year's theme, of 'football in the Asian century', only made things more difficult, especially for the often narrowly focused (when they're not suffering from self inflicted tunnel vision) Australian rules people.

The opening night panel session included Satoshi Shimizu of the University of Tsukuba; Jennifer Curtin of the University of Auckland; Matthew Klugman from Victoria University; and Seongsik Cho – Hanyang University.

Much of what Shimizu had to say was covered in his keynote the next day, and thus I've decided not to include his remarks here.

Jennifer Curtin made some strange assumptions about the audience's familiarity with the women's rugby union world cup, and by extension I think with how much Australians knew or cared about rugby union in general. This hampered her presentation somewhat. Her overarching argument that women's sport should be treated more fairly by sponsors and the media is a noble and fair one, but it failed to address the issue of quality. What if women's sport is broadly inferior to men's sport, because women can't run as fast, kick as long, or be as strong as male players? What if the highest level of a men's version of a sport is simply more aesthetically pleasing, or played to such a punishing level of professionalism where the game becomes dull, surely a sort of high watermark for sporting excellence? Framed like this, I think, it doesn't become only an issue about gender inequality - though that surely exists, in terms of support and opportunity for female athletes - but something applicable even in male sports. There are reasons more people in Singapore (for example) follow the EPL rather than their local leagues, and one of those reasons is the playing standard. It's likewise why many people from Western Australia and South Australia, rather than ignore the West Coast Eagles and Adelaide Crows and instead follow their local clubs, instead followed the newly founded de facto state teams to the detriment of long standing local sporting institutions. How women's sport overcomes these non-gender specific institutional barriers is something that also needs to be addressed when discussing the gender imbalance in support and funding of women's sport.

Matthew Klugman's point that professional sports leagues and organisations are now primarily media content providers was one of those things that I really should have already known, but had in my own way never been able to articulate; indeed, it's an issue that I've somehow avoided talking about as a specific phenomenon, rather than as a consequence of other influences. Much of Klugman's point is about the NFL as the market leader in this, going back into the 1970s, but the implications of that philosophy are both apparent for all to see, and yet also simultaneously not yet fully realised. What would happen to these leagues in the event that free to air and/or pay television - a crucial funding source of the massive salaries of the athletes and teams in these competitions - is no longer relevant? What would happen if television remained important, but to the expense of people attending matches to the point where they stopped attending in numbers? Do television audiences also implicitly demand that there be crowds and atmosphere on their screens? Do audiences of different sports react differently to uneven competition, and for those that expect a relatively even playing field, does a lopsided competition decrease interest to the detriment of the 'product? Conversely, does too much interference by the governing body to ensure a level playing field also put people off? And if the European footballing giants managed to create their own league, would their overseas fans jump off the bandwagon if an English giant (say Liverpool), got nowhere near winning the competition for a decade?

At the other end of the scale, if the top tiers are media content providers, what does that make lower tiers? While we can conceive that the lowest tiers of sport will still be mostly about social competitions, there's a middle tier - say, a place like where the NPL clubs are, or the VFL/VFA teams - where the clubs can't be sustained merely by the social aspect; nor are there enough funds to make it something more than a development league. In some ways, this can be extrapolated even to the experience of teams in top leagues who happen to be mid-table also-rans, with next to no hope of ever winning a championship.

Seongsik Cho's discussion on the status of South Korean soccer was interesting, at the very least because despite the increasing official/top-level engagement of Australian soccer with Asia, our knowledge for the most part in terms of the common person is extremely poor. Cho's assertion that South Korean soccer still lagged behind baseball (with the exception of the national soccer team) for example would probably be news to a lot of Australian soccer fans. Cho added that despite club soccer trailing the relevance of baseball, the national soccer team evoked a sense of identity in a way that baseball did not, and that naturalisation of foreign players into the South Korean national team elicited different attitudes - in this case, much more xenophobic/nationalist -  in soccer compared to other sports; Cho's assertion being that a foreign born naturalised footballer would be far less acceptable to South Korean society than an equivalent athlete in another sport.

Day 2
Satoshi Shimizu provided the day 2 keynote address, on 'The Transformation of Asian Football Cultures in the Last Two Decades: A View from Urawa, Japan’ Shimizu is a softly spoken academic, but unlike one colleague of mine who boycotted this because he thought he wouldn't be able to understand Shimizu, all it needed was a little bit of patience. Shimizu provided a sprawling presentation, veering from the micro to the macro and back again, but never failing to be less than engaging.

Shumizu's analysis of the stagnation or plateauing of the J-League provided interesting insights not only into the state of Japanese domestic football - which like Korean football, still lags behind baseball, despite Japanese baseball's own long term problems - but also into Japanese society as a whole. In that respect, Urawa and the Urawa Red Diamonds are both an anomaly because of their status as a regional soccer hotbed prior to the establishment of the J-League; but also typical in that elements of the problems Japan is facing as a society, especially as regards to racism, xenophobia and the ageing population.

While the J-League has had occasional spikes in attendances since its establishment in the 1990s, these were mostly linked to the opening of new stadia and the occurrence of big events, the effects of which did not last long. Now the thing that I think people are having difficulty figuring out, is whether this plateauing of support is a strength, in that they are not losing fans, or a weakness, in that the halt of growth signifies the point where eventually the sport will begin to decline. This is of course not a problem unique to Japan; but where other countries may be able to ride out a whole series of peaks and troughs regardless of the short term alarm that may be on display, Japan's significantly demographically aged population offers less hope for renewal.

That the Japanese as a whole are wary of immigrants and of diluting their racial and cultural purity only adds to the problem. While hardly at the forefront of the overall problem, the way this has manifested itself at Urawa Red Diamonds is a neat example of the kinds of issues Japan is facing. Where once Urawa were at the forefront of good relations with overseas clubs - the example Shimizu gave was of an Asian Champions League match against Shanghai Shenhua, where after the match the Chinese were so impressed with the Urawa fans' support that they shared drinks with them and attempted to emulate their kind of support. A few years later though, and the Urawa fans became embroiled in controversies over xenophobic banners and chants.

That in a heavily self-controlled social polity like Japan, where displays of personal expression and deference to hierarchy are paramount (at least in daylight hours; at night things are often different), it's important to note that the football stadium is perhaps the last regular, organised democratic intermediary space in a late-capitalist society. Behaviour which would clearly not be acceptable in everyday society, especially if conducted within the guise of a large mob, all of sudden has a space allocated weekly for people to vent all sorts of frustrations.

Finally, I was intrigued and largely unaware of Japan's attempts to promote its domestic football throughout South-East Asia. In this case, it must compete against several different factors. Firstly, the popularity and reach of the EPL, La Liga and the UEFA Champions League. Secondly, disinterest from potential markets in Cambodia, Vietnam and Singapore for their own leagues, let alone a Japanese league. Thirdly, not even taking into account the fact of the bitter historical prejudices which still exist, the potential influence of a more assertive or aggressive Japan in alienating potential support away from the J-League.

Hunter Fujak's presentation (with Stephen Frawley, who was absent) ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ A Longitudinal Analysis of Football Attendances and the Australian Population' was a great example of both the necessity and the pitfalls of trying to see into the future of Australians' interest in the different football codes. Readers of this blog will almost certainly know that I'm wary of statistics at the best of the times, especially as they get extrapolated from small samples towards building up a bigger picture - regardless of the mathematical models which can demonstrate how it's a perfectly legitimate way to measure things. Still, there will always be that bit of me, and I think many others who will always feel an instinctive reticence to give in to mathematics while we still trust that oh so much more reliable judge of data, the gut feeling. Fujak's presentation was completely the right kind of provocative, entirely evidence and methodology based, but still leaving enough room for people to be able to point out the possible blindspots and assumptions made. Whether Fujak has accounted for changing media landscapes I don't know, but the perceptive analysis - already being seen in the EPL for example - first, that the average age of season ticket holders is likely to get older; and second, that relative to population size, Australian football crowds are at a much smaller percentage of the population than they used to be, should be of some concern to all of football's governing bodies. The question that follows on from that is this - have we hit peak football?

When the title of your paper is 'The Demise of the Australian National Soccer League, 2000-2004', you've by necessity set up a powder keg just waiting to go off; but even by that hyperbolic assertion, I don't think young researcher Goce Risteski could have quite anticipated the response that his presentation would receive. First things first - you have to admire the chutzpah of Ristevski in trying to cover such a huge topic in the 20 minutes allotted to most of the presenters. Unfortunately, Ristevski's relatively shallow analysis of the financial mess waiting to happen that was Carlton (and its ripple effect across the league), or the Despotosvki incident - in other words money, ethnicity and violence - was met with incredulity by certain members of the audience. Chief among these was Roy Hay, who delivered a brutal assessment of the presentation: 'You've set the course of Australian soccer research back 20 years'. Thankfully another soccer academic, Mike Pierce, came to Ristevski's defence, telling him to ignore Hay and his pet theory about the issue of the governance structure in Australian soccer being the key impediment to the long term success of the sport, and to keep pursuing the angles he wanted to. Later on, I was informed that Hay had apologised to Ristevski for the blunt manner of his criticism. My problem with Ristevski's paper was more straightforward - I simply felt that it offered almost nothing new to a topic that has been raked over countless times by journalists, academics and public servants alike. That's not to say there aren't new angles worth pursuing - the individual histories of the clubs and major parties involved in the transitional period; comparisons to the way that suburban NSL teams often had similar problems to suburban rugby league, Australian Rules and basketball teams, similarities often obscured by the obsession with Australian soccer's ethnic question; and the effects on those supporter groups who have stayed loyal to their former NSL clubs, while their then fellow supporters moved on. These are questions which seek to tackle specific cultural, sociological and historical issues, rather than a broad and generic overview of history that has more or less been settled.

Matt Harvey's 'Rebels with a Cause: The Melbourne Rebels – Rugby in the Heartland of the AFL', while entertaining due to Harvey's half serious, half parodic presentation style, in the guise of the boorishly insular and ignorant Victorian sports fan for whom little other than footy exists, was not even borderline academic, and there's really no way of getting around that fact. Harvey's assorted musings on why the Rebels even came to exist, jokes about nomenclature and the kinds of people that the team attracts in Melbourne, were all undone not only by the lack of evidence and academic rigour on show, but even by the simple fact that Harvey had not even been to a single Rebels game. On the plus side, it did a good job of alleviating the tension in the room.

Jorge Knijnik's 'They Will Never Understand Us: An Ethnographic Study of the Western Sydney Ultras Fandom Culture' is the kind of paper I would naturally be suspicious of, it being about ultras, the A-League and people who I perceive to have an incredible sense of self-regard. For better or worse, I wasn't won over by Knijnik's method; maybe I have an innate distrust of the kind of immersive anthropology he's involved in, especially as he is also a supporter of the Wanderers and someone who stands within the RBB not only as an academic, but also as a fan; and I say this as someone who covers similar territory in terms of writing about South Melbourne and the behaviour of certain supporters, albeit not with the same official academic lens. Not having much of a background in anthropology - a few years ago I did one semester's worth of an honours unit looking at a range of theoretical problems; I was forced into a PhD unit looking at ethics in research; and I've seen all of Star Trek: Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, which deal substantially with the problems of anthropology - makes my judgement less than useful here.

At times I was concerned with the way Knijnik seemed to portray the RBB as a far more homogenous group than it probably is; while his emphasis on the way a group like the RBB, as part of the broader Wanderers' philosophy (or marketing strategy) promoted inclusiveness, improved socialisation and harmony between different ethnic groups, I wanted more on what the different groups within the RBB were, and how they related to each other; who's the boss, and how are cases of violent incidents both within and outside of the ground dealt with? How and via who are relations with police, the club, the FFA and the media organised? Is everyone who stands with the RBB equal, or are some supporters more equal than others? Does the group dynamic of the RBB imply a sense of obligation rather than one of spontaneous chanting?

On a more positive front, considering my persistent criticism of the way that various presenters at this conference have often (whether intentionally or not) conflated the experience of one city or state as being equivalent to a national experience, it was good to get a perspective on Sydney that acknowledged the fact it's at the very least two different cities, if not three or four. Of course a topic on the Wanderers makes this so much easier, the Wanderers and their supporters perennially reinforcing their otherness or apartness from what they perceive Sydney proper and by extension Sydney FC to be, by emphasising real and/or imagined differences and fissures. Loyal vs fickle; multicultural vs cosmopolitan; workers vs the upper class; born of the people as opposed to being funded and operated as a rich man's plaything; standing for something specific and tangible, both communally and geographically, as opposed to something far less tangible. How valid any of these binaries are is something certainly worthy of discussion, even if it in some ways falls outside the what Knijnik is looking at.

To hear Knijnik in his own words, visit Brogan Renshaw's Behind the Game podcast series, where Renshaw interviews Knijnik about this and other topics, including Brazilian football.

I was keen to see the presentation by Andy Fuller (with the absent Fajar Junaedi) 'Supporter Groups in Indonesia: Trajectories in Fandom, Politics and Soccer Activism', principally because of my interest in the Jakarta Casual blog, which tries to make sense of South-East Asian football for an English speaking audience. Fuller's interest in the topic differs from Jakarta Casual's though, in that the emphasis was on the members of PSIM, a club from Yogyakarta, and their attempts to negotiate the perilous world of Indonesian football fandom, and doing it by getting close to the locals speaking in their own language. In some ways, this presentation is related to Brian Moroney's look at the ultras scene at Lazio, which was covered at the previous conference.

Indonesian football, to put it bluntly, is a mess. The league structures are erratic at best; interest from anyone other than the lowest classes is more or less non-existent, with the possible exception of the national team, and those who can leverage the sport for political purposes; most of the stadiums are well past their use by date; the clubs are run exceedingly poorly; referees treated appallingly, the players somehow worse (some have died for lack of wages and medical care); the police routinely prevent games from taking place in a club's host city; and yet despite this, there are still often good crowds for games, and diehard supporter groups will travel across the country any way they can to cheer on their team - though as Fuller noted, not always the heads of the supporter groups, who have bounties on their head from other supporter groups.

The interesting part of the research was the attempt by some members of PSIM to start detailing the history of the club. Media coverage of the sport has been poor, but the internet age allows for the possibility of fans taking matters into their own hands. In a country where local football seems to exist outside the bounds of polite bourgeois society (who are more interested in the fortunes of foreign leagues, especially nowadays the EPL) -  the government itself has little to no interest in fixing the endemic corruption in the game, and occasional national team success in the ASEAN tournaments is viewed as the pinnacle for Indonesian soccer - it's almost inevitable that a grassroots effort in recording the history is the only way it's going to happen. Whether this will translate to something will move across to other clubs, I'm not sure, as the supporters of Indonesian clubs often have fierce and violent rivalries with each other.

You can see an unrelated post of Fuller's on Shoot Farken on match tickets as memorabilia, and in this case as mnemonic artefact of the 2015 Asian Cup.

Tony Ward's paper - whose title escapes me, as like nearly everything else, the conference programme booklet is packed away in some box as I prepare to move houses - focused on the long term (20 years or so I think) analysis of the popularity of various football codes as conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The data seems to show that the AFL does a good job of maintaining fans throughout the years/various age groups; the NRL not so much, losing fans over time (whether this is terminal, and not part of a cycle, was not clear). One crucial point of difference between the two codes is that in the AFL, women continue to patronise the competition at every age, while in the NRL women's attendance drops away significantly after their early 20s. Likewise, when looking at the two competitions, and their principle cities, Melburnians were more likely to attend other sports in addition to Australian Rules, whereas for Sydneysiders, Ward's analysis seemed to suggest that they tended to exchange sports and sporting allegiances rather than add to their collection. Sadly, due to government cutbacks, this kind of data will no longer be collected.

Ian Syson's 'Losing Contact: Soccer's Place in Post-World War I Melbourne', continued on with his recent efforts in researching the effects of World War I on Victorian soccer culture. This paper focused on the relationship between soccer and Australian Rules in the 1920s through to the 1930s, which starts off well but soon deteriorates as the Victorian Football League in particular becomes more insular and xenophobic. Syson demonstrated that in some cases in the early 1920s, Australian Rules bodies and journalists were more sympathetic, even cooperative, with regards to soccer. By the late 1920s however, the VFL had turned the other way, belittling soccer and pressuring its clubs (and the relevant venue managers) to no longer allow soccer to use their facilities. While the downturn in soccer's fortune's in Melbourne in the late 1920s and early 1930s were partly self-inflicted - a disastrous split destroyed the growth of the game at the time it should have been solidifying its recent growth - the onset of the Depression, and the fact that few enclosed grounds were available to them for big games also took its toll. How much soccer was hurt by its inability to secure its own enclosed ground and some sort of headquarters, was perhaps only properly realised in the 1950s, when the code managed to secure Olympic Park as its premier venue.

Despite its unwieldy title: -'Annual General Meetings Newspaper Narratives Showing How Different Victorian Football Association/Victorian Football League Football was in the 1890s' - Abdel Halabi's presentation was one of the more surprising (for me at least) papers of the conference, looking at how Australian Rules football club AGMs of the 1890s were more than merely formulaic procedural sessions, but also events which brought communities together. Apart from the specific issues relating to the club, which saw the club's performance and finances discussed, the AGMs were a social event unto themselves. This could mean that town halls would be hired to accommodate the huge numbers of people seeking to attend, prizes would be awarded, songs would be sung, entertainment provided etc. What I suppose astonished me about this was not only the large attendances,. but also the depth in which the media of the time covered these events. The difference with AGMs these days couldn't be more different - relatively low key, and in the case of a club like South, attended by only a very small percentage of the membership base. Usually I frame attendance at a South AGM as both a moral duty of sorts for our members, but also as a means of making use of and reiterating one of the key differences between our ownership model and those of the privately owned franchise system. In many ways, while this approach is well intentioned, it also shows how limited the AGM has become as an event in itself compared to what it used to be; and that would equally go for the AGMs of AFL clubs. In these days of the increasing commercialisation and privatisation of sport, with the ordinary fan increasingly relegated to the role of faceless wallet, the AGMs of the past show how a more democratic, inclusive and plain old fun event could perhaps lead to a revival of people power in sporting clubs. Something to ponder, no doubt.

Day 3
Jennifer Curtin's keynote address kicked off day 3, looking at the complicated history of women's involvement with rugby union in New Zealand, including anti-apartheid protests, their involvement as players, and as supporters of men's rugby. It seemed to be the case that while rugby union in New Zealand is clearly the dominant sport, it also contains an element in its make up that elevates it above the station of other sports that may have an equivalent level of dedication - and that element is that rugby union has been at the centre of key moments of New Zealand civic history.

Rugby in New Zealand is an essential element of Pakeha (white European) identity, male identity and national identity. Women's participation in this culture though has often been sidelined by patriarchal imperatives, whereby women becomes invisible participants in the culture. Because of this, women were discouraged from playing rugby, and instead funnelled towards netball. Thus women choosing to play rugby despite the cultural and structural impediments is unavoidably a political act. Women were accepted as supporters of men's rugby - as spectators and someone to do the laundry, but discouraged from playing. What was interesting about this is that Curtin seemed to suggest that gender stereotypes were more prevalent in the Pakeha culture than in the Maori culture.

The net effect of all this though is that many women in New Zealand who have an interest in rugby have a love-hate relationship with the game. This perhaps reached its peak during the controversial Springbok tours of the 1980s. Feminist groups who were involved with anti-Springbok tour protests were often described as being anti-rugby, and by extension anti-male and anti-New Zealand. For those involved with the protests, it was a difficult tag to shake off. Any attempt at contravening the conservative 'invisible' roles allocated to them makes visible, shocking the patriarchal rugby world.

That these kinds of issues are manifest across the world when it comes to women's participation in sport is not surprising in the slightest - what this keynote showed however is how much more clearly the obstacles facing women in sport are via the example of New Zealand, a country with a small population and particular focus on this one game, with all that extra cultural and imperial baggage attached.

Tim Hogan's presentation, 'Reading the Game: Documenting the Text and Art of Australian Rules Football', saw Hogan discussing his continuing work of cataloguing Australian Rules football material, including various literature, and even songs, but also looking onwards to choosing websites to preserve. Quite how the selection process works for that, should a website exist outside the parameters of the Wayback Machine project, I don't know. While I'm aware of some efforts in Australia to preserve different websites of note, their publicity departments could do with a bit of a kick in the pants.

Trevor Ruddell's 'A Future for Footy Books?' looked at the history of Australian Rules books, especially the increase in production, and what the future may hold for that genre. Prior to the 1980s, there were few books looking at Australian Rules. Since then there has been substantial growth in that market, but there are also potential problems related to both the status of the book industry but also the status of Australian Rules. Australian Rules, having probably already reached its peak spectator/audience/interest level, has basically nowhere else to go; thus it relies a lot more than say soccer or cricket on being able to exploit the audience it has. With the larger and wealthier clubs (especially in Melbourne) also looking to cash in on this area, often with elaborate and expensive coffee books, what are the chances that eventually the target markets will suffer from merchandise fatigue? I also wonder how many of these kinds of books are bought and treated more as an ornament than actually read? And how much of these histories are an attempt to mask the fact that the clubs are largely bland copies of each other nowadays?

Having gone through parts of the Victoria University PhD system with Julian Ross, I was looking forward to seeing what stage he'd reached with his work via his presentation. 'Graham ‘Polly’ Farmer and John Newman: A Content Analysis of Football Life, 1967-1976'. Ross overall project is looking into a biography of Sam Newman, putting forward the interesting notion that the Sam Newman persona has little to do with the private John Newman, and another persona which Ross claims to exist alongside those two. I'm interested to see how this comes about, in part because I come from a literary background, including having done some work on the auto-biography - inherently relevant here as Newman has carefully gone about cultivating two very different characters, keeping them as separate as possible - while Ross comes from outside the literary tradition. The relationship of Graham 'Polly' Farmer then, Newman's footballing mentor and immediate predecessor as number one ruckman at Geelong, seems to be a pivotal part of the picture that Ross will have to cover. Unfortunately, Ross' presentation covered little of what the title suggested it would, instead becoming mostly a digression into some of the specialist football newspapers and magazines of the time, that existed outside of the mainstream newspapers media, and very little on the relationship between Farmer and Newman. A missed opportunity.

An example from the marketing campaign seeking to put pressure on the
Washington Redskins to change their name and logo.

Desiree Barron's 'Playing Against the Chief: American Indian Representation and American Football in the Twenty-First Century' was perhaps the must see presentation of the conference, one of those events where woe betide the person who happens to be presenting in a parallel session. Barron discussed the not just the issue of the Washington Redskins, and the increasing pressure from activists and the general public for them to change their name and logo, but what the wider implications are of this debate. Barron discussed the history of Indian related names became a part of the culture of American sports (and by extension, the military) from the top level to the grassroots. One theory is that it was a way of European immigrants to 'Americanise' themselves, as part of their efforts to disassociate themselves from their British and European histories.

Barron also highlighted a crucial element that has been overlooked. Yes, the logos and names are racist, and would be completely unacceptable if it depicted other ethnic groups in such a way. But the issue is also one of sovereignty. These images challenge the right of Native Americans to control their own imagery and cultural property, a problem which extends into all areas of their lives. Barron discussed how American high schools have begun to gradually change their logos and names where they cause offence, but the big money in the big leagues - and the supporters of these teams - are resisting hard. The solution Barron argues, especially in cases where Native American groups and their non-Native counterparts seek to work out a middle path, need to be seen as authentic and meaningful to both groups. In a later discussion after her presentation, I asked Barron about what the situation was in Canada, where some similar names and logos exist (though not nearly to the extent of the US), and the fact that some native groups have residents on both sides of the border, and the answer she provided was interesting - that it was less of a problem in Canada, not only because of the smaller prevalence of these kinds of names and logos, but also because the Canadian Aboriginal population was far more socially and politically advanced than their US brethren; thus the former come from a position of relative strength that the latter are yet to achieve.

Matthew Klugman's presentation ‘We Already Hear the Sneerers Talking About the “Football Mania”’: Using the Emergence of a New Phrase as a Historical Window into the Emerging Mania for Football in Britain' was a brilliantly entertaining look into the way that religious and secular institutions attempted to deal with the emergence of mass footballing culture in late 19th century England. While football was played socially and relatively informally for centuries, the emergence of the codified, organised form of football caused a great deal of distress among certain elements of British society. A useful context I think for understanding those concerns is the fear of crowds that governments and religious authorities had at the time, especially if they were not able to control them for their own ends. Manias, too, - not an exact psychological term by any stretch of the imagination, but for an example of the kinds of phenomenon relevant to the discussion, see this link - were never far from the forefront of the Victorian consciousness. Perhaps what troubled the governments and religious authorities most was that the football mania actually endured, and thus the fervour, emotion and sheer waste of time on something so trivial and outright common. Even while football as a spectator sport, despite several peaks and troughs, has become subsumed into the capitalist framework - and after all, wasn't that inevitable as soon as players became professionals, and the spectacle leveraged for profit? - one can see still see the distrust from the authorities for the game, as it relates to the point from Shimizu's keynote address: that in a late-capitalist society where the individual has been socio-physically cleft from his fellow members of society, the football stadium may be the last point of mass democratic dissent; dissent not in a necessarily violent or political manner, but as simple as a contained moment of joyous anarchy.

You can read a version of Klugman's presentation on the Shoot Farken site, which is much better than my ad hoc summary.

I'm sorry to say that Sarah Oxford's presentation, 'The Gender Paradox: Young Women’s Inclusion in the Sport for Development and Peace Movement', is one that has suffered greatly from my delay in reporting back. The presentation was about using sport in developing and/or third world nations, in this case Kenya, to achieve a number of positive humanitarian and development outcomes. Using the example of a project in Kenya promoted at women and girls, Oxford discussed how the stabilising effect of sport, and the routine it can provide, can lead to other positive outcomes, especially for NGOs working in these areas. Thus via such programs, NGOs can provide better access to health and education services, as well as breaking down conservative gender roles. But this is where it gets tricky, because there are all the usual issue of cultural sensitivities that need to be dealt with as well - when does the quest for improving gender equality turn into cultural imperialism?

Final thoughts
I think I must have a mind that's set towards trying to force together narratives out of disparate voices and stories, but I think I got a few things out of this that may point to a few trends.

Firstly, that the way fans react to change is often largely based on their mistaken ideas of the history of their sport - specifically, that the way they've grown up following their sport is the same as it has always been, and that even the fact that following a sporting team at all in organised competitions has a longer history than it actually does (aside from examples like Byzantine chariot racing).

The reaction to those changes then, at least among a certain section of the population, is to go back. When the lay person does this, either by retreating from over commercialised sporting experiences or by wholesale escape into the fantasy of reminiscence, it is often done without remembering all the bad things that existed during those eras. The academic sports historian is also not immune to those tendencies. Indeed, I believe there is a tendency (and I'm certainly not immune to it), to if not create a hagiographic view of the past, than to at least insert a sort of wistful tone to it, smoothing off the rough edges, and creating the sense that much of what was done back then was actually planned, adding a sense of historical prescience via our values to what those people were trying to achieve back then,

Moving from the past towards the future, I'm innately wary of those attempting to future proof their sports, especially from a commercial standpoint. Looking 10, 20 or even 50 years into the future, and trying to plan accordingly seems to those folk to be necessary - and I can understand why - but it also seems incredibly hubristic. Seeing as how often times these projections and plans are based around the success of the top level, one wonders what the consequences are for those groups who fall outside of those commercial imperatives - and what will happen if or when the television funding model, the integral source of funds for most important leagues, changes or collapses?

Within that, the health and well being of athletes has often taken a back seat. In the future, will our treatment of the professional athlete class be seen as an equivalent to slavery and the base gladiatorial contests of Rome? There's also the undercurrent, which is seldom openly acknowledged but always there, that at some point having turned top-flight sport into a commodity primarily about entertainment, that audiences will get bored. And if that should ever come to pass, what happens then? Is the resurgence of the football stadium as a means of collective identity, as opposed to a setting for an individualised and predominantly televised product, a way of saving football from itself?

In that sense, the conference danced around the theme of mediated spaces. The control of space is fundamental to sport - the mastery of a designated environment, and especially in the football codes, is where codified sport starts from. Outside of the field itself, there are the arenas around the fields themselves, where we see the competing demands of economics, capacity, comfort, ownership and expression negotiate some sort of middle ground; then there's the media space, struggling with the consequences of the digital age, as leagues, clubs, players, established media, new media and the man and woman  on the street all fight to sway the still developing format one way or another - some of out of fear of losing control, others because they see an opportunity long denied to them of being able to speak back to the machine; the competition between sports for attention in an increasingly crowded and competitive market, as once isolated markets becomes opportunities for bigger and wealthier organisation to expand their colonies.

In many ways, that kind of questioning harks back to essays that I would write as an undergraduate. They would manifest themselves as expressions of doubt and uncertainty, even in the conclusions, where our western argumentative tradition demanded finality and resolution, and a firm position taken within the bounds of academic style. It's been a constant struggle for me to overcome those rhetorical tendencies, and yet this issue of mediated space in sport seems to me to be something that's so fluid at this point in time, that I'm voluntarily drawn back to this old trope of mine.

To finish, a quick thought on the conference topic. Quite how Australians deal with Asia, both within and of sporting contexts is still something that we clearly don't have a good grasp of, except to say perhaps that we don't do it very well. Natural demographic change may mean that this will change naturally of its own volition, but in the mean time one of the things brought up in the opening night's discussion may be worth considering - that by re-framing what we see as our distance from Asia - socially, culturally, even geographically -  into something more like proximity; the fact that we are economically and geographically closer to each other than any place else, and that this relative shortness of distance will in time be able to overcome our tendency to be both Euro-centric and stuck in the Anglophone world, despite the historical processes which created our sense of place and culture.

Seven points ahead, still - Dandenong Thunder 0 South Melbourne 1

Apologies, but this entry is mostly obsessed with a sports forum I attended on Thursday and Friday.

Frankly, there isn't much to report on from this game. On an uneven pitch, in front of what looked like a South dominated crowd - which is kinda scary considering there weren't that many more of us than usual there - we played well in fits and starts, stood our ground in defense, rode our luck just a smidge, and ground out another win, and got three points closer to winning the title.

The thing that was most striking about the match though, was how few Thunder supporters seemed to be in attendance. The collapse in their home support following the grand final rocket flare fiasco, and the attendant punishments from FFV have really knocked the stuffing out of the Thunder. It's a pity to see. It's a long way from the heady days of that first meeting between our sides at this venue in 2009, and the very large crowd that was in attendance. It all seems like ancient history now.

We started off both halves with the (relative) momentum of a runaway freight train, before Thunder were able to work their way into the game and even fire a couple of shots on goal. During our spells of dominance - where Thunder struggled to get out of their own half - we unfortunately didn't trouble Zaim Zeneli in goals very much. He made one terrific save with his legs when it looked for all money that we were going to open the scoring.

Thank goodness for Jamie Reed then, who managed to get the goal that won the game. Zeneli got his hands on it, but couldn't keep it out, and then we had to hold on for a nerve wracking finish as Thunder tried to get a point out of this match, which would not have been totally unjustified. There were handball calls at either end which weren't called by the referee, and the odd long bit of scrambling defence

Quite what the deal was with the person at the freeway end sitting in their car with their headlights on during the second half, I'm not sure. It made it very hard to see what was going on at that end whenever the ball ended up in the headlight glare, and it took what seemed like forever to actually get that situation sorted out. Security seemed more interested in Clarendon Corner's swearing than actually dealing with a patron who was being a genuine nuisance.

The support behind the goals in the second half was good, even making Zeneli laugh at one moment when someone said something to the effect, we never hated you, it's Gus Tsolakis who fucked you over. The players came over after the match and thanked those supporters, and the vibe seemed very positive. Still I can't be the only one who's still not confident enough to call it, to actually embrace the seven point lead we have and the diminishing amount of time Oakleigh in chasing it down. Eight years of mostly mediocre results has eroded the trademark Hellas cockiness that even I used to subscribe to.

Doing the sums
So the maths as they stand are like this. We're on 59 points, and Oakleigh's on 52. The maximum number of points we can get is 68, and the maximum Oakleigh can get is 64. Therefore, if we win two more games out of our remaining three, we'll reach the magic number of 65, reaching the point where Oakleigh can't catch us.

However, if we beat Oakleigh in our round 25 game, the maximum number of points they'll be able to get is 61, and three points from that game would take us to 62 points. Of course, I'd rather we somehow sorted it all out before that.

Next game
Northcote at home.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, but if someone else pays for it, it's close enough
I managed to score a free ticket* to Victoria University's 'Sport in Victoria - Who's really winning?' forum, which is a good thing because the cost of a ticket to the entire thing would have set me back over $300. Movers and shakers from a range of sporting interests rocked up to discuss issues such is 'Melbourne the world's sporting capital?', 'Is it possible to win fair?', and 'Is hosting major sporting events worth the effort?'. The forum ran over Thursday night and Friday, and was run out of the MCC, which was a great thing to keep in mind when people tried to hint towards the egalitarian and communak nature of Australian sport and avoiding trickle down economic style solutions to our sporting problems.

The MCG's version of a tanning salon. pic.twitter.com/Q3K8xkPyXw
— Paul Mavroudis (@PaulMavroudis) August 14, 2014

Thursday night was a dinner thing, so lots of suits except for the odd western suburbs bum like me who rocked up in jeans and a hoodie. Entree was some fancy poached chicken, main was some sort of meat that was, by my standards, still mooing, and dessert was some sort of attempt at a custard tart, and I had two of those because frankly I was still hungry after the other two courses. Western Bulldogs president Peter Gordon, Kate Roffey, CEO of Committee for Melbourne, Mike Clayton, Principal, Ogilvy, Clayton, Cocking and Mead (something to do with golf) and  John Jacoby, Race Director of Rapid Ascent (some endurance thing) were the panel for the dinner, discussing "Is Melbourne the sporting capital of the world? As the world’s most liveable city, does Melbourne promote recreation and active living enough? Is promoting professional sport and community health in conflict or complementary?"

Peter Gordon aside, who made tremendous sense as well as being affable and charming, the rest kinda put me to sleep as we somehow sauntered into discussion about whether Melbourne should bid to host another Olympic Games, and a debate from the floor with Australian Grand Prix chief Andrew Westacott about whether Formula 1 (and motorsport in general) was a sport or not. My thoughts turned more to this however.

#SportInVic whether F1 is a sport/not, & even its cost to host, less of an issue than massive annual loss of public space for 3 day event
— Paul Mavroudis (@PaulMavroudis) August 14, 2014

I'm also sick of this idiotic obsession of being the world's most livable city, when those metrics seem inherently to apply to the experiences of the people who live within the confines of the inner city. And as for active participation, let's not forget this gem of an observation by yours truly:

#SportInVic Running? Jumping? Cycling? Swimming? How about getting people to walk more as a starting point?
— Paul Mavroudis (@PaulMavroudis) August 14, 2014

Why were the panelists (across both days) so obsessed into getting people into sports or activities that could be leveraged commercially? While a rhetorical question, the opening session on Friday, "Major Events and The Economic Impact of Sport: Is this a key driver for the economy?" went some way to answering it. It was chaired by Radek Sali, Swisse CEO, who also put forward what sounded like a ten minute sales pitch on his company, frequently using the irritating and almost meaningless buzzword 'wellness' (and by frequently I mean enough times that I noticed and became irritated by it, so at at least twice). On the panel were Andrew Westacott, CEO of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, John O’Sullivan, managing director of Tourism Australia, Brian Morris, CEO of the Melbourne and Olympic Parks Trust and Professor John Madden of the Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University.

Apart from Madden, I generally felt that the other three panelists tried to justify the existence of a major events oriented sporting direction. Madden went the other way, pointing out that realistically, hosting major sporting events (mostly referring to one off things like the Olympics) doesn't really boost economies - what it mostly does it redirect funding and investment into those areas necessary for hosting the relevant event, at the expense of other services and areas of the economy. Madden argued that theoretically there were ways exacting a profit from such events, cost cutting, having already existing infrastructure, something Melbourne would have an advantage in; but he also hedged his bets, by adding that people were willing to pay a certain amount for intangible benefits, such as the prestige of hosting the event, increased national pride etc. Quite why an economist was talking about the intangibles, without even providing a method for accurately measuring them (and who knows how you would even start with something like that), I don't know. But it did remind of the words of a panelist at a public transport forum I went to last year, a PhD student who argued that governments (in part due to the need to conform to the whims of the electoral cycle) the world over seemed to become entranced with building expensive, flashy, big ticket items at the expense of smaller, incremental and more cost effective improvements, a phenomenon noticed by at least on other person at this conference:

#SportInVic improve the Triple Bottom Line .. less event specific infrastructure investment...focus on-going incremental investment
— anne-marie hede (@amh_1) August 15, 2014

I suppose though, that if the electorate keeps falling in love with these leviathan projects, and get taken in by the associated hype, then what can those who object do?

This #SportInVic session making me wonder, is Melbourne a sporting capital because of participation, or a bread and circuses mentality?
— Paul Mavroudis (@PaulMavroudis) August 15, 2014

After morning tea, the next session was "Can You Win Fair? - Sport, Drugs, Ethics and Science", with Richard Ings, former Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, ASADA, David Grace QC, president of Athletics Australia, associate professor Dennis Hemphill, College of Sport and Exercise Science, Victoria University, and Caroline Wilson from The Age. Since prettuy much everyone in the room agreed that you can win fair, and that it's ideal to win fair, the discussion turned to what we could do to stop cheating, and some people pointed out that too much money was the cause. Thankfully somebody pointed out the bleeding obvious - that people in sport cheat all the time, at all levels, at all ages. Success is the key motivator; money is sometimes a reward for that success, but not always.

I was disappointed that the discussion never really went in hard as to what is and isn't classed as fair, and more importantly just who gets to decide. The closest it seemed to come was the idea that fairness was a construct, but there was little in the way of why we cared so much for sporting fairness, when fairness in the rest of society is getting such short shrift (my opinion, thought author and academic Michael Hyde wondered out loud to me, why wasn't anyone talking about class?), and why did we demand higher standards of fairness in sport than in other areas of public life? Why are sporting leagues allowed to, even encouraged to be run as cartels seeking evenness in competition, while the rhetoric about what kind of society we want as a whole goes the other way?

Because this session featured Caroline Wilson, it naturally threatened to turn into an Essendon saga special; unfortunately the fun police intervened, and thus the most interesting thing to happen at the conference got nipped in the bud - though you can read Samantha Lane's version of events on that and the wider panel discussion here.

The lunch session (chicken and potato, walnut and date poudding with salted caramel - whatever happened to unsalted caramel?) also had a panel discussion, "The Way Forward for Victoria – Cause and Effect: Elite Sport or Community Participation?" with Colin Carter, president of the Geelong Football Club, Professor Rob Moodie, Professor of Public Health from The University of Melbourne, John Bertrand, president of Swimming Australia, Kate Palmer, CEO of Netball Australia, and chair of Victorian Institute of Sport. and John Wylie chair of Australian Sports Commission.

Though the discussion, when it turned to the issue of getting kids to be more active, the fact that there seemed to be obsession with getting Phys Ed and sport back into schools was worrying to me - the fact that the American example of playing school in sports as opposed to at clubs also annoyed me. I was worried because the former is a bureaucratic response to a deeper problem - why aren't kids being active in their own spare time, of their own volition? You know, doing the things kids used to do because they wanted to do them - run, cycle, skip, hop, jump, kick a footy with their mates. Why do all these solutions focus on supervised and structured forms of increasing activity? Annoyed, because in the latter, the ritual humiliation of the weak and puny along with the concurrent idolisation of the teenage sports star in America seems just as idiotic. What happened to be being active as a kid because it was fun? 'Where are the parents?' your correspondent shrilly cried.

Seeing as the next session was going to be about the Olympics again, this time about our diminishing medal returns, I finally cracked and left this parting shot (there was another Simpsons quoting one which you can dig out yourselves)

#SportInVic I'm out of here, because there's only so much angst over our Olympic performances that I can handle.
— Paul Mavroudis (@PaulMavroudis) August 15, 2014

Checking the forum's Twitter feed later on, Nicole Livingston seemed to make some good points about the Victorian situation in particular, especially how the AFL's media dominance takes away any and all attention away from other sports (and not just women's sports). But by that time I was at Newport station and completely jaded by the general thrust of the discussions which rather than seeking to improve the sporting experience of Melburnians for the sake of it, was rather always on the lookout for a way to leverage it for a commercial gain of some sort - whether that was a corporate sponsor promoting their products, an event manager trying to explain why their event was really important for Melbourne (and worth the cost), or different sports trying to claim recreational participants as part of their own official fiefdom.

*the ticket was paid for by Victoria University, but the version of events as discussed above has nothing to do with them.

Commit to community TV
I've been a big fan of Channel 31 for years (even donated money to the crowd funding effort for the third season of the quiz show 31 Questions), but unfortunately the future of community TV is apparently up in the air because the federal government has not yet renewed Channel 31s broadcasting licence, which is due to expire at the end of the year. Therefore, if you can spare a moment, I recommend heading to Commit to Community TV to add your name to the petition. For those that are cynical about such internet campaigns, a similar grassroots effort helped reverse funding cuts to community radio a year or two ago.

Hopefully the club adds its support to this campaign as well, because being on Channel 31 has been something which has kept us in the broadcasting limelight, however marginal that might be compared to the past. It's also worth remembering that our present show is not the first time we've produced a show for Channel 31, with older heads no doubt remembering the old TVH produced South Melbourne Soccer Show, which was launched all the way back in in 2002.

By the way, there must be a way to get a hold of the tapes from those people, because chances are that it contains rare footage of not just the club, but of an era of Australian domestic top-flight football which got a serious lack of broadcast coverage. Make it happen SMFC media team.

Final thought
Who's up for a night out at Kingston Heath for the Bentleigh vs Oakleigh game on Friday?

Vic Uni St Albans Campus artefact Wednesday - South fan profile

When Victoria University academic and sometime blogger Ian Syson wants someone to help clean out and/or organise his office space, he calls in the professionals. And by professionals, I mean me, because I did get paid to do it a couple of times.

As part of said organising process, I get to keep duplicate books (usually novels - I still need to read Mary Barton and Dr No) as well whatever other crap Syson decides he no longer needs. Thus I ended up in the situation whereby I came into possession of some decade old soccer magazines. Most of these were copies of Soccer International (about 4-5 copies, if you want them, contact me) and one copy of Action Soccer.

The photo below is from Action Soccer, a magazine I know next to nothing about. This version of it had the banner on the front claiming to be 'your essential guide to thr 1999-2000 NSL season', and I guess it performs that function adequately. There's all sorts of curious timepieces in there of course. Club profiles, rising star pieces, a Socceroos pullout poster, and a photo of Vaughan Coveny showing off his nipples.

But the bit I decided to pull out of there this time - I may revisit this magazine in future when struggling for artefacts to upload - was a fan profile. It was part of a set of four, and apart from ourselves, it included Carlton, Northern Spirit and Perth Glory profiles (which if people who support(ed) those teams want, I can provide via email).

It's a pretty spot on profile - fickle, but not that bad, limited chants as they were at the time with more focus on abuse/opinion, and of course good travelling support. I don't know about the rest of them, but the bloke in blue smack bang in the middle of the inset photo still comes to games. Hell of a guy. Click on the photo to enlarge it - maybe you're in there somewhere.

Sunrise, Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset...

Firstly, congratulations to SMFCTV main man Paul Zarogiannis, who was awarded the Sam Papasavvas Award for volunteer work at the club. Well deserved.

That happened during the Gala Ball last Saturday, which I'm not going to complain about, because I did not pay my for my ticket.

Now, for a couple of ins and outs for 2014.

Out

• Peter Gavalas, 2013 FFV goalkeeper of the year, due to increased work commitments. He will be missed.
• Fernando De Moraes, whose retirement has been made official. We'd like to make a big song and dance about Fernando, but hopefully we can do that next year, because we anticipate - nay, demand - that the club hold a testimonial dinner in his honour in 2014.

In

• Steve from Broady. Admittedly, this is not South related, but apparently he's landed a job at my very own place of employment. There goes the neighbourhood.

Worlds of Football Conference begins tonight

Really looking forward to this, partly because I'll be presenting my first ever academic paper on Australian soccer in literature, and soccer in Australian literature.


This will be the second time Victorian University is hosting its Worlds of Football Conference. Last time was back in 2010. It's meant to cover all football codes, but I'm most interested in the soccer articles. Here are my notes from the previous conference.

This year's program looks reasonably promising, Dr Kevin Moore from the National Football Museum in England is giving the keynote address tonight at the MCG.

Les Street will be giving a paper based on his masters thesis on NSL venues, with the paper focusing on Sydney venues. Sadly, he's scheduled to be directly against my paper - I was looking forward to his presentation the most.

Chris Egan is giving a paper on the founding of Perth Glory - it's part of his efforts to write a book on the first 15 years of Perth Glory.


Some of the other Aussie soccer papers:

• Francesco Ricatti, University of the Sunshine Coast, and Matthew Klugman, Victoria University ‘“Connected to Something”: Soccer as a Site of Transnational Passions, Memories, and Communities forItalian Migrants’
• Ian Syson, Victoria University, ‘The Calm and the Storm: Soccer Reporting in Melbourne, 1908-14’
• Roy Hay, Sports and Editorial Services Australia, and Les Murray, SBS Sport, ‘Proving a Negative in History: The Non-Appearance of the Hungarian Football Team at the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956’
• Trevor Ruddell, MCC Library, David Studham, MCC Library, and Helen Walpole, National Sports Museum ‘Representing a Divided Australia: Uniforms of Australia’s National Football Teams

In terms of non-Australian content the details are as follows:

• Peter Ochieng, Victoria University, ‘Rule of Three: How Resources Separate Winners from Losers at the Africa Cup of Nations’
• Brian Moroney, Victoria University ‘The UltraS of Italian Football: A Justified Violence?’

Les Murray will also be on a panel session on 'the future of football', with Steven Alomes, which I know Syson is really looking forward to. Melbourne Heart's Scott Munn will be on a panel discussing 'football in the West'.

I'll be providing a rundown after the conference of how everything went.

Alphabet Soup - Melbourne Knights 2 South Melbourne 2

Didn't deserve to win, didn't deserve to lose. Out of that we somehow got a draw. There was controversy, lots of goals, bit of niggle, and yet it just didn't do something for me. Maybe I can sense the end of the season is coming for us, and I'm already subconsciously getting ready for it.

Anthony Giannopoulos
Still can't catch a break.

Baggio played for South!
But not the one you're thinking of.

Clarendon Corner
Going, going...

Derby
If a derby gets played in the woods (or the back blocks of Sunshine) and no one notices, did it actually happen?

English Premier League
Starts again this week, or so they tell me. Shoot me before my Facebook page gets cluttered with mostly Grecian Geezers (and I'm not referring to Exeter City fans).

Fernando De Moraes
Early in the second half he was provided with the best cross we've made since the 1999 NSL grand final, and we all thought it was in. It wasn't. Anyone else and we would have expected that.

Glen Trifiro
Does he even give a shit any more?

Heidelberg United
Sad that their troubles are the only thing we can smile about this season.

If We Are To Make The Finals...
My guess is that we'll have to get ten points from the remaining twelve. I think we'll fail at the first hurdle this week at home against Dandenong, but I would love to be proven wrong. PROVE ME WRONG BOYS! PROVE ME WRONG!

Joe Montemurro
Anyone notice anything different while he was coaching the last two weeks?

Kevin 'Power Trip' Docherty
Good on him for giving that red card to the Knights player, even if the players involved thought nothing much of the incident. Stupid and pointless act by the player in question.

Low Flying Aircraft
The view from Knights Stadium is good, but not quite up to the helicopters landing at Moorabbin Airport during a game at Kingston Heath.

Marinos Gasparis - Man For A Crisis
Apparently going off to Greece (mate's wedding) and will miss the next three games or so. Great stuff.

Nick Jacobs
Broke his leg while playing school football. Get well soon, champ.

Olympic Games
Thank Lucifer that crap is over. Now we can focus on sports we actually like again.

Pigeonhole Key

That's me next to David Hicks. We had some good times.

I think the reason that Victoria University and their crack security squad is stalling on this, is because I actually am a security threat. Hopefully my apology for chucking The New Citizen and other Larouchian propaganda into everyone's pigeonhole will be seen as sincere.

Quote of the Month
From our old acquaintance Mercs, who doesn't come around anymore, but whose blog we read for reminders that there are sporting clubs almost as fucked as ours, and for work like this.


You'd never turn back a win (well, you might if it was 2009 and SNIP - legal department) but a victory of this variety was a bit like on-screen nudity before the internet came along. Back in say 1992 you didn't know when you were going to see norgs again so anything looked good.

Ražniči
Not the best thing I've ever eaten at the soccer, but not the worst either, and great value at $6 with cabbage and onion! And service that was atypically cheerful for Knights Stadium.

Social Club
They tell me that they've finally and actually moved the stuff that me, Steve from Broady, Mr Valkanis, Polish Nick, Ryan the Intern (and possibly assorted others) put into boxes out of there, and into storage. Maybe we will get the

Twitter
I am now officially a Twit. Check me out at @PaulMavroudis, though I probably won't have much, if anything to say. How does this crap even work?

Unidentified Vehicle
Starting beeping me on Ballarat Road, no idea who they were, what they wanted, whether they were sticking their finger up at me, whether my white South hoodie was actually a Collingwood one. I just tried to concentrate on getting to the ground in one piece by focusing on the road.

Victoria University Students
Plenty of time to sink piss. Not enough time to read a couple of articles.

Worlds of Football Conference 2012
I've submitted my abstract - will they allow me to present a paper? Or will I have to go back to reporting only on everyone else's papers? Interesting factoid about that piece - despite being just about the most high brow piece on here, it still ranks as one of the most visited pages on this site. Not too bad considering it isn't a Hellenic Cup or Jim Marinis piece.

Xenophon
The most delightful of all music, that of your own praises.

Young Wife
Because the Government does not favour the entry of foreign women, New Australians are often men without wives; hence unfulfilled desire reinforces love of country. There is no night life worth mentioning, no corso, no processions. In other words there is nothing, though it’s a comfortable nothing. Bored and frustrated, the New Australian is permitted to express himself once every seven days for twice forty minutes (sic) at the soccer match (Martin 1966: 152)

Zenith
People still think we're not a VPL club. How cute.

Some general ponderings on the Worlds of Football Conference

Apologies to my readers in advance, but this may very well be my longest, most jargon laden, left wing piece yet on this blog; so I can understand if the general reader, who visits this site to gain news and opinions on South (and who may or may not also be fascist sympathisers) may feel shortchanged by the experience. However, I do encourage people to have at least a skim of the article, as it might provide some folks here with an insight not only into the range of work currently being undertaken by academics into sport (and the crossover it has with mainstream/lay people), but also perhaps create a better understanding of my own social and political positioning.

This was my first such university run, scholar oriented conference, but I'm not going to bore you with the details of the catering arrangements. Rather, I'd like to provide some notes of indeterminate length of some of the papers presented and the conversations undertaken over the two days. I'll do it in one go, even though it's a fair bit to take in one hit.


Rob Hess' keynote address on the past, present and future of women's participation in Australian Rules football, was both illuminating and of course frustrating. A lot of the evidence presented, particularly the photographic evidence, gave a certain level of nuance and detail to an area that like much of women's sport, and indeed women's histories, very much hidden, ignored and undervalued.

The dress-up craze of the early 20th century means that in many articles addressing women's footy games, you can't actually be sure that it's women participating despite what the piece may say, as much of the photographic evidence appears to suggest that it was often men dressing as women who were in these contests. Other photographs showing women in footy guernseys can't be taken as evidence of continuous organised competition; more often, it was evidence of one off novelty or charity contests, or once again, merely posing for group shots in a whimsical fashion. The lack of continuity in women's footy is emphasised by the fact that the Victorian Women's Football League, founded only in 1981, had no idea of this past legacy.

While all that is quite well and good, Hess' (who has an eerie resemblance to former AFL coach Robert Walls) bias towards Aussie Rules means that there this participation is not put into quite as clear a context as I would like or deem appropriate. No mention at all that proper soccer leagues for women were organised in Victoria almost a decade before the beginning of the VWFL, and that women's sports in general were used for charity and novelty purposes, much as the rare tours and matches of soccer by Asian opponents were heralded more for their novelty.

As to the future, Hess sees a continuing boom for Australian women in footy, but I feel he over-stretches it somewhat, especially in comparison to soccer. After all, women's soccer, which has professional leagues and international competition, provides a level of competition that women's footy can never aspire to. Likewise, with the rude health of college women's soccer in the United States, talented young players from Australia may also have the chance to both play soccer and get an education at the same time, bundled with the experience of a lifetime. Maybe I go too much the other way, but footy people can have a certain degree of tunnel vision.

Jessica Carniel's look at Australia, Asia and the Geopolitics of Soccer, was by her own admission, rather slapdash and still a little primordial. Key themes which she addressed were not Football Federation Australia's particular reasons why they switched to Asia, but rather what it might mean in the context of the wider Australian nation's attitudes towards our place and role with East Asia in particular. To that end, I felt Carniel failed to adequately place the Australian game within the fullest context of both Australian soccer's relationships with Asian soccer, but also Australian society's attitudes as well. Limiting herself somewhat to comparing Australia's first (failed) attempt to join the Asian Football Confederation to our success in doing so in 2005, she did not address the attitudes to Asian and international participation in the preceding 80 odd years of soccer's existence in this country.

What this means is that there is the very high possibility of committing the oversight that different attitudes brought along with the non-British migrants along with their zeal for professionalising the local game, may have been part of the instigation for attempting to join the AFC and indeed have a red hot go at participating in World Cups and so forth - as opposed to the previous administrations overt preference ot waiting for the Old Dart to send a group of relative nobodies out here. There was however as with most of the conference, little time for questions, unless one wanted to speak with a mouth full of falafel wraps.

Roy Hay presented a paper on 200 years of reporting football in Australia, a slightly ambitious claim in terms of length, and while ramshackle in its approach, still managed to provide a very general overview of how (and who) reported on the different games of football in Australia over its history. One thing already familiar to me through being exposed to the work of Ian Syson, is in the early days of attempts to organise competitions, the lack of clear descriptions in articles of what exactly people were playing on any given day. It leads me to the conclusions that either there is an assumption on the part of the reporter that the reader will immediately understand or implicitly know what is being played - or my preferred option, that there was in most cases a uniform lack of a desire for posterity's sake, an inability to live beyond the moment and provide something of use to future generations.

Which contrasts so sharply with what happens to soccer writing in the 20th century. Despite whatever marginal positions the game found itself in, there is a demographic amongst soccer followers, both trained and untrained in journalism, who are prepared to collect, collate and maintain the game's history. The reasons for this were mulled over only briefly by me and Roy, and fell within the usual scope of why it turned out this way - namely that soccer as a marginal sport, especially within the media, unwittingly created a niche that could be filled by people that sought to do so. Thus, there are specific soccer newspapers in the 1920s, 1950s, 1980s and 2000s, all seemingly run on the smell of an oily rag.

I also put it to him that for whatever reason, the Australian soccer media's quality and scope of writing, from both a journalistic and lay perspective was often of a higher calibre (especially when discussing the nuances of the game) and more politicised compared to its footy counterparts. Within so much of the available soccer specific press, we find so much to do not just with matches, but with issues and personalities. It's an ambitious and probably unfair claim to make - but I tend to find even the most brain-dead of Australian soccer forums simmering with these tensions. Perhaps there is element of distance between ordinary supporters of Aussie Rules from their administrative masters that does not as yet exist in Australian soccer.

I was unsure how I would react to linguist Kieran File's look at post-match interviews - linguistics is an area of study that I am certainly interested in, and  find fascinating when presented well, but I also find myself struggling to deal with the terminology and unique forms of discourse. In the end, I came out of this presentation considerably underwhelmed. While quite ready to forgive the fact that the research was both apparently novel in its scope and that it was still in its early stages, File presented little that I felt was new to the field of the post-match interview.

File focused on data collected from European Rugby Union matches, and presented flow charts detailing the mode or function of the different sorts of questions asked by interviewers and the responses obtained. Perhaps it was not within the scope of his work, but I felt a little shortchanged by the lack of what I consider the obvious question - why do we care what players say especially if they're only going to provide the usual self-censored and mechanical responses? When there is the rare occurrence of something 'interesting' being said, it'll be splashed across youtube and news networks soon enough, and the giddy little thrill of seeing it live is relatively minor. Maybe when he gets data to compare the differences of post-match interviews in team sports and individual sports, as he plans to do, there might be something more substantial to chew on.

Of the various topics on offer - all the presentations were run against either one or two other sessions - those focused on social and new media and networks always tugged at my geeky heartstrings. Hey, I've spent so much time on these things over the past decade or so. All of which meant that I was a little disappointed in the papers presented on these issues, which I feel continue to either undersell and/or misinterpret the place of the online sphere.

Brett Hutchins' paper on Twitter and the new ways that it allowed players and sports organisations to bypass the traditional media, while acknowledging the importance of new media in speeding up communications in the public, still isolated it from traditional practices and functions. More than anyone who presented over the course of the two days, I'm probably being most harsh and unfair on Hutchins, perhaps because I'm more in line with Ian Plenderleith's view on these things. I wrote about it an only slightly cantankerous article a little while back, which is oddly enough one of the more popular articles on here in recent times. Go figure. You can skip that and go straight to Plenderleith's When Saturday Comes. My argument is that none of this new media is particularly new, just more organised and more open to legal action.

Which brings me to RMIT student Hugh Macdonald's look at Virtual Communities in Australian Rules Football. Hugh looked a little nervous, and I probably didn't help when I corrected him about when Richmond entered the VFL (he said 1925; it was of course, 1908). It was such a mundane and inexcusable error, of the kind that threatens to overshadow your entire presentation. Which to be fair to Macdonald, was not that bad, but ran into trouble where most essays looking at internet forums do - the almost inescapable fact that these places are temporary and elusive. Not just in data and hardware terms, where discussions literally disappear from caches, but also in the behaviour of the participants. While most online forum participants display a certain level of honesty, that level varies greatly between different people - in some cases to the point where, intentionally or not, it becomes a form of identity art, creating malleable personalities.

Whether by purpose or design though, Macdonald does stumble upon something important within an AFL context - just as the last vestiges of club differences are being utterly demolished, and where the AFL, its clubs and the media are on the verge of monopolising how different events are portrayed, the rise of the internet allows disparate supporters to come together, not to necessarily agree with each other on certain issues, but at least in the majority of cases make a social contract, whereby they choose not to be enslaved entirely to the corporate sports machine that has set up camp at the foot of Afghani like impenetrable mountains looking for the last rogue elements of resistance. It's a guerrilla campaign, and as mentioned earlier, not everyone is on the same page when it comes to what's being fought for. But the fact that there several outlets providing access to resistance shows that the internet can do some good, even if it's only providing a place to run to.

Dave Nadel's paper on the state of footy in Gippsland was interesting in as much as it allowed a moderately in depth look at how regional towns, and especially those with very small permanent populations, are managing to hold on. Squad point systems were only briefly touched upon, as was the effect of combining netball and football clubs into one entity on survival. There was no comparison with Gippsland soccer, which was disappointing because while there are less competitions and clubs, there is still a three division competition (with the remnants of a former national league participant). Maybe it just wasn't in the scope of the argument that he was trying to make? Maybe I want soccer to be in everything.

Moving on to a completely different tangent now, to the problems, and possible solutions of football in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. These two separate papers were presented by Peter Ochieng, in part presented on behalf of the absent Majed Alahhmad (Saudi Arabia) and Qusai Mubaidin (Jordan).

In the case of Saudi Arabia, the issues of women's participation was one that stood out like a sore thumb, but so it is with the rest of Saudi society. Instead the focus was on why Saudi Arabia's performance in men's football had slipped so dramatically in the last few years, after at least being able to reach the World Cup finals. Issues of the use of money to solve the problems, the lack of patience and the lack of trust and initiative placed into its own development systems, for players, referees, volunteers was at the forefront - and similar problems seem to exist in the soccer fortunes of other Gulf States (albeit those do not necessarily have the population of the Saudis).

The lack of hesitancy to use foreign players as part of the national team (provided they convert to Islam of course) was explained within the cultural parameters of the Gulf - so much of the workforce (quite possibly due to the restricted lives and opportunities for local women) is made up of guest workers - it seems only natural to import footballers as well. The scope for improvement is also dependent on which Saudi prince is in charge - a 'progressive' may seek, for whatever reason to undertake the necessary changes, but there's no guarantee that Prince will remain in that position for long - and the archaic method of having to personally consult the one person with any power makes things go slower. Still, the one bit of obvious hope for the game in Saudi Arabia is that the more religious lobbyists, cadres, demographics, call them what you will, show little interest in football, allowing more leeway perhaps than in many other sections of society. The climate of the region doesn't help though.

In the case of Jordan, a small population (about 5.4 million) and limited financial resources makes things harder. And yet, there has been improvement of late for the Jordanians, by restructuring its internal systems and attempting to promote the abilities of its young players overseas. All this work is still in a very nascent stage, but there appears to be an acknowledgement that they should send their best young players to Europe to develop further. For both Saudi Arabia and Jordan, comparisons were made with other Middle Eastern and Arab nations, highlighting the importance of human resources - administrators, referees, coaches - to a national team's success.

Which leads into Peter Ochieng's discussion on African football, and the surprising (to me) and important re-evaluation of the influence of player managers and agents in the footballing fortunes of a particular nation. It's fair to that say player agents have a bad reputation, and in the public's mind at least, a well earned reputation, And yet, properly organised, accountable, well trained and ethical agents can have a tremendously positive influence on footballer's lives - for many young footballers, living thousands of miles away from home, their managers may often be as close to father figures as they may get.

This can be seen in the transformation of the industry from being dominated by player agents, whose main goal is to help negotiate contracts and then departing the scene, to full service player manages, on beck and call 24/7 to iron out any situation as it arises. The other side of Ochieng's argument, is that competent player agents can also be a means of both providing avenues to players to more lucrative employment, but also to create an environment where prospective clubs looking for new players are made aware of the widest possible range - this links back to the Saudi and Jordanian examples, where the argument is also made that as part of reforms, more player managers and agents are required to establish the networks and open the door to these opportunities for player from so called football backwaters.

I also managed to have a good and lighthearted chat with Ochieng, mostly centred around how we got to where we were and/or are in Australian soccer, and comparing each other's corruptions, with his example of his native Kenya, where the official responsible for providing the uniforms to a team of athletes ending up selling them. Well, he won that debate, though my buddy Gains' recollection of the Indonesian FA boss who was running his organisation even while he was in jail is still way out in front.

On to the second day, with the opening presentation being the keynote address by Jayne Caudwell, on Football in the UK, LGBTQ Participation and The Justin Campaign. For those like myself, unaware of the Justin Campaign, it's an anti-homophobia group with the specific aim of tackling homophobia in football. Cauldwell's was the outstanding presentation of the conference, her research rooted solidly within academic theory and yet also remarkably accessible. She presented the reluctance of the English FA to assist or partake in the campaign against homophobia until very recently, and the similarities in the long road to getting action on tackling racism on the terraces.

There was also analysis of the geographical/personal space that the homophobic insults used amongst football fans (and indeed amongst the wider public) sought to penetrate and use to establish dominance over minority opinion, as well as the way it is used to transform oneself into a more usually more masculine presence (in both men and women homophobes). The problems which arise in confronting the problem were also discussed in the presentation and later on - with one of the chief issues being that soccer fans, and in particular the organised groups of mostly young men that make up chanting/singing groups at games are (mostly unconsciously) self-identifying as reactionary traditionalists - that is, people who more often than not offer no other excuse for their behaviour than the often trotted out line of 'tradition' - irrespective of how long or short, how damaging or ignorant participants may be about these traditions.

It's not just a soccer problem of course, and Cauldwell coming from an English background (she's also from the University of Brighton) meant that, so much of what she presented which made perfect sense within in an English context, comes out all askew in an Australian context, because here soccer is the 'poof's game'. I wish we could have Cauldwell spend a couple of years in Australia getting a feel for how it all works here.

Ian Syson presented a shortened version of his paper How Lost Was My Archive, looking at 'new narrative possibilities in Australian football histories'. I'd seen this presented at least once before and was familiar with its content - this was a tightened version, the most coherent so far. For those not up to speed, Syson (and all all right thinking iconoclasts) are seeking to tear down the mainly Aussie Rules created ideas of the clear and concise birth and development of the various codes in Australia. To that end, soccer's appearance in Australia has been pushed back from its 1880 Sydney debut, to an earlier date (which escapes me now, bah) in Tasmania, to other matches where half and half games were played.

The other part of Syson's work was to do with promoting the work of the National Library of Australia's newspaper archives, which we've spoken about in other places on here. While the positives of the archive were extolled, the dangers of using it to the exclusion of other sources and traditional methods of research were emphasised, especially with the 'magpie approach' of picking out bits and pieces and moving on and the pitfall of ignoring the cultural environment that exists around certain articles. That, and the fact that other newspapers and sources could have quite different views of an issues, or whether they give it any importance whatsoever.

Steve Watters talk on The ‘Battle of Solway’ Wairarapa versus Hawke’s Bay, was interesting mostly within the context of learning a bit about provincial New Zealand rugby, but for me, not too much else. It's a good story, but it really did seem out of place amongst much of the work being presented, as if the details were mostly already settled - certainly it didn't seem to be a 'lost' history of any sort.

Ken Mansell's look at the Charles Boyles photo collection was a bit of a revelation to me. Boyles took photographs of many sports, but principally footy, between 1916 and 1953. They are almost uniformly artless and mundane photographs of teams and players across the decades - there are no action shots, no crowd shots, just posed photographs. Boyles sold these photos around the football grounds of Melbourne - such was his lack of interest in any sort of posterity, that he left no notes, no writings, and none of the photos are marked with anything other than a copyright notice consisting of his name and address on the back of the photos.

Thus, many of the photos are now of unknown and unidentified clubs and players, with often the only clue to an era being the grandstand that may happen to be in the background. Boyles, though crippled since childhood, created a small empire, in Mansell's words 'controlling the production, distribution and sale' of his work, and 'encapsulating, in primitive form the basic elements of the marketing colossus that is today's Australian Football League'. So many photographers try to capture 'the moment', a defining image of an era - it is part and parcel of action oriented photography, an art form seeking to find something that will survive in the public consciousness due to its unique ability to wordlessly sum up a passage of time. Boyles' photos are at the opposite of the scale - they are everyday, making gods into mere mortals - though that could be because we don't know or are not intimately and personally familiar with the exploits of these past players. As an aside, I was apparently able to help confirm that an unidentified team photo from the late 1930s or early 1940s was that of the Williamstown Football Club, from the time when they seemed to have a gold guernsey with a blue sash, as opposed to their usual and traditional blue guernsey with a gold sash.


John Cash and Joy Damousi, and after them Deb Agnew, both looked at the issues faced by retired AFL players. The scope covered the practical, such as work, education, lifestyle, money, and the 'theoretical' - that is, in creating a new persona independent from football, and the requirement to create and re-mold one's sense of masculinity. The data presented was mostly of players who seemed quite well adjusted, and even somewhat already prepared for life after football. Notably, this preparation seemed to originate from within themselves, and not from initiatives originating from the clubs.

The players interviewed crossed several eras of the post-1990 AFL transformation from 'state' to 'national' competition - thus covering players from across the nation, but not omitting players who played during an era still describable as semi-professional. The AFL apparently did not consent to having current players being interviewed, which to me indicates that there are problems with the player welfare initiatives that currently exist. Are players being enrolled in dud TAFE courses just to comply with education/employment targets? What are the levels of literacy and numeracy amongst AFL players? All this, and the frequent question of whether some of these blokes even have the basic social skills to function without player managers and clubs micromanaging their affairs. Deeply concerning - but most of us will happily look the other way if our team can get a flag.

The last session I attended was a panel discussion, looking at anti-homophobia initiatives in Australian sport. Sadly, Pippa Grange from the AFL Players Association was a no-show (I don't know why), but Sunil Patel from Gay and Lesbian Health Victoria was there to talk about his organisation's poster campaign, which sought to use sport/aussie rules as a common ground to help people come out to their families. It's an interesting angle, and I fancy that if you live in inner city Melbourne you've probably come across these posters (there are several variations) adorning various walls. Next up were a couple of representatives of the queer (or queer friendly depending on your definition/choice of words) soccer club Melbourne Rovers. The Rovers, apart from playing under their own moniker in games against other gay clubs, also play within the metropolitan system under the auspices of the Yarra Jets. Once again, an interesting angle, with comparisons made between playing for a 'mainstream' sporting club as an openly gay man in comparison to playing in a gay team within a a club that is open about its zeal to be diverse and open, and yet not listing the gay wing of its club amongst its achievements. We have a ways to go it seems.

Jayne Cauldwell was also on the panel, as was Eric Anderson, an American who's done some work amongst British youth with regards to their attitudes to homosexuality, and boy was he keen to tell us the good news. And it is good news. Turns out that in much of the nation, when choosing the most average/median schools they could find (both public and Catholic) that young people's attitudes to homophobia are markedly different to even those of people their age ten years ago - and by different, I mean far more progressive. Maybe it's just a British thing at this stage, but evidence in Anderson's research suggests that homophobia is quickly attaining the status of racism.

So why was I not as ecstatic about these facts as I should have been? Can it be the classic lefty preference for truly unwinnable causes, that should certainly not be won, lest we get what we're actually fighting for? Do I hang around South people and other assorted reactionaries too much? Or was it just the fact Anderson paces along the front of the audience like the  self-help guru, eager to sell us the message that will save us? Maybe a bit of all those things. He was up there for maybe 10-15 minutes, and I felt exhausted by his approach and demeanour, and could not contemplate sticking around for his keynote address, though I don't doubt that it was informative and passionate.

Nevertheless, it was a pretty full on and worthwhile couple of days, providing much food for thought. And if you've managed to get this far through this article, I hope that some of that feeling has entered your headspace too. I just hope some of it makes sense.